Is Burt Rutan About to Become the Bill Gates of Space?

I spend a lot of time going back and looking at what made Microsoft great largely as a contrast against what the founders are currently doing. At the beginning, what made for a successful start was that Paul Allen, clearly the idea guy, figured out he needed someone with the drive to complete the vision and if he hadn’t found Bill Gates, Microsoft would have been a small footnote in technology history. Since then, Paul Allen has had a lot of ideas, many of them good ones, but he never found another Bill Gates again.

One of those ideas is to create a relatively inexpensive way to launch rockets into space and, given this could benefit everything from providing space based streaming video capability and global phones cheaply to dumping nuclear waste into the sun, this could be even bigger than Microsoft.

Stratolaunch

The Stratolaunch concept isn’t really new. The idea of lowering cost by launching from an aircraft has been talked about for some time and some space based weapons are launched that way today. What makes this different is the scale, because most of those earlier ideas were based on existing aircraft and the size of the launch vehicle was pretty small. This idea uses a massive aircraft, which would be the largest ever made and a launch vehicle that could lift everything from space lab components to people into space. This is a relatively heavy lifter and likely critical to making trips to the Moon or even Mars affordable enough to once again being considered.

This is important because the US is in another space race and China and Russia have taken over the lead in it as their costs were vastly less than the US’s for the Shuttle. Currently, the U.S. is increasingly relying on Russia for a lot of its heavy lift capability, particularly people, and given the initial space race was with Russia, that implies they may have eventually won it for now. Not by being first, but by having a more acceptable cost. They can even take rich people into space on a junket.

The really cool part of this is that launches could occur out of airports equipped for large jets and not require the massively expensive launch facilities that rockets currently require with the possibility of massively undercutting China and Russia’s costs and once again establishing the U.S. as the leader in space.

It is often argued that the winner of any battle is the one that gets to the high ground first and, in a world of limited resources, it seems strategically foolish to allow other strong countries to establish this high ground.

Rutan – Gates

Like Bill Gates had with software, Burt Rutan has a passion for flight and is well recognized as one of the most qualified to lead an effort like this. Unlike Allen was at the start of Microsoft, he is very wealthy now and has a substantial amount of political clout, a necessary element when you are talking about competing with NASA.

Unlike Microsoft, this won’t be about putting a piece of software on each of our desks, but on putting the U.S. back into the lead in the race to commercialize space and, given this country needs every commercial opportunity it can get at the moment, it could end up saving the country’s economy much more than Microsoft did.

Stratolaunch Systems will showcase whether Allen and Rutan can build another Microsoft. For the future of the U.S., I sure hope so.

Rob Enderle in Business on December 13